I have been using Pandora for quite a while, and have never felt the need to upgrade my account to the Pandora One service. There has never been a big enough reason to get me to pay the $36/year to upgrade. I don’t believe I am stingy… I just don’t believe in unnecessary spending. If you check out the link above, there really aren’t that many advantages to using Pandora One. The main benefits are higher quality streaming and the…

It is surprising how often I see confusion around the MySQL float and decimal data types – especially when it comes to deciding which one to use when storing financial figures. Let’s compare the float and decimal definitions, and then compare the two in real use. From the MySQL documentation: Float: A small (single-precision) floating-point number. Allowable values are -3.402823466E+38 to -1.175494351E-38, 0, and 1.175494351E-38 to 3.402823466E+38. These are the theoretical limits, based on the IEEE standard. The actual range…

One of the most important things done during the process of setting up this blog was creating the permalinks structure. Instead of the normal and sort of ugly: http://www.heldit.com/?p=3 URL, this blog has been set up to use a different structure. You might notice that the URL of the current page is: http://www.heldit.com/2009/11/architecture/wordpress-permalinks-with-apache2 Which I consider to be the better and more useful URL. Both links above will actually go to the same page, but the second link is the…